Julius II, one of the most warlike of all the Roman Pontiffs, was the first Pope who permitted his beard to grow, to inspire the faithful with still greater respect for his august person.  Kings and their courtiers were not slow to follow the example of the Head of the Church and the ruler of kings, and the fashion soon spread among people of all ranks.

So highly prized was the beard in former times that Baldwin, Prince of Edessa, as Nicephorus relates in his Chronicle, pawned his beard for a large sum of money, which was redeemed by his father Gabriel, Prince of Melitene, to prevent the ignominy which his son must have suffered by its loss.  And when Juan de Castro, the Portuguese admiral, borrowed a thousand pistoles from the citizens of Goa he pledged one of his whiskers, saying, “All the gold in the world cannot equal this natural ornament of my valour.”  And it is said the people of Goa were so much affected by the noble message that they remitted the money and returned the whisker—­though of what earthly use it could prove to the gallant admiral, unless, perhaps, to stuff a tennis ball, it is not easy to say.

To deprive a man of his beard was a token of ignominious subjection, and is still a common mode of punishment in some Asiatic countries.  And such was the treatment that the conjuror Pinch received at the hands of Antipholus of Ephesus and his man, in the Comedy of Errors, according to the servant’s account of the outrage, who states that not only had they “beaten the maids a-row,” but they

                      bound the doctor,
  Whose beard they have singed off with brands of fire;
  And ever as it blazed they threw on him
  Great pails of puddled mire to quench the hair (v, 1).

In Persia and India when a wife is found to have been unfaithful, her hair—­the distinguishing ornament of woman, as the beard is considered to be that of man—­is shaved off, among other indignities.

Don Sebastian Cobbarruvius gravely relates the following marvellous legend to show that nothing so much disgraced a Spaniard as pulling his beard:  “A noble of that nation dying (his name Cid Lai Dios), a Jew, who hated him much in his lifetime, stole privately into the room where his body was laid out, and, thinking to do what he never durst while living, stooped down and plucked his beard; at which the body started up, and drawing out half way his sword, which lay beside him, put the Jew in such a fright that he ran out of the room as if a thousand devils had been behind him.  This done, the body lay down as before to rest; and,” adds the veracious chronicler, “the Jew after that turned Christian.”—­In the third of Don Quevedo’s Visions of the Last Judgment, we read that a Spaniard, after receiving sentence, was taken into custody by a pair of demons who happened to disorder the set of his moustache, and they had to re-compose them with a pair of curling-tongs before they could get him to proceed with them!